Carrots For Regional Desegregation -- And A Court Suit For A Stick

December 07, 1992|By DON NOEL; Courant Political Columnist

Vincent L. Ferrandino of Wilton, Connecticut's commissioner of education, is busy looking for ways the state can undo generations of racial isolation in the state's schools, and assure urban minorities equal access to quality education.

Attorney General Richard Blumenthal is meanwhile busy looking for arguments to persuade Superior Court Judge Harry Hammer that the state isn't responsible for generations of neglect, so therefore court-ordered desegregation is inappropriate.

Gov. Lowell P. Weicker Jr. agrees with both officials: He shares the commissioner's hopes for a fairer school system -- on which the state's economic future depends. He also shares the attorney general's hopes to avoid anything approaching court-ordered busing.

The effect, as a historic court suit nears, is to give the state a split personality: We didn't do it, but we can do it better.

Trial is to begin Dec. 15 on the historic case titled Sheff vs. O'Neill, brought three years ago in the name of Milo Sheff, a city 10-year-old, and 16 other plaintiffs, against the state. (Court cases keep their titles forever. An earlier case that changed funding of schools is still called Horton vs. Meskill, even though Gov. Ella T. Grasso had become governor by the time the case was decided. Gov. William A. O'Neill, the named defendent in the school-desegregation case, left office in 1989.)

The case is the first in the nation that relies on a state constitution rather than the U.S. Constitution.

A series of court tests, beginning with the Kansas Brown vs. Board of Education case in 1954, established that separate education of black children violates the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection. But those cases rested on demonstrating discrimination; there is no U.S. constitutional guarantee of public education.

Connecticut has one: "There shall always be free public elementary and sec ondary education in the state."

The state constitution also describes a "school fund" whose interest is to be spent for public schools. Support of schools has

long since become part of the general fund budget, but the constitutional language offers a powerful ar gument for Milo Sheff: The school fund was to be "for the equal benefit of all the people ... as justice and equity shall require."

The plaintiffs don't need to demonstrate conscious discrimination, as they would in a federal case. They will instead simply ask the state court to fulfil the constitutional guarantee of equity. And it's been clear since 1954 that equity doesn't mean separate but equal.

The most important question of 1993 may be whether Ferrandino, Weicker and the General Assembly can make significant progress toward desegregation while Blumenthal fights a delaying action in the courts.

The best solution would be for Judge Hammer and eventually the state Supreme Court to decide that major steps are needed -- but to observe that significant steps are already under way, and give state officials time to make even more progress.

That would avoid the turmoil created in, for example, Boston, when court-ordered busing was the only remedy available to the courts.

Ferrandino has proposed a series of steps:

Extra state aid for intra-district, regional schools that will naturally draw children of different ethnic and economic background -- and less state aid for go-it-alone schools.

The state already offers extra money for magnet schools whose specialized programs attract students from several cities and towns, but there have been more ideas proposed than there is money; Ferrandino wants more money in the kitty.

In the longer run, he suggests creating suburban-urban-rural regions charged with finding ways to diminish racial and ethnic isolation within each region.

All those ideas entail hard choices, and more money. The new constitutional cap on spending will make new money for education scarce.

Offering financial carrots for regional solutions will inevitably mean less ordinary state aid. Legislators are always reluctant to take money away from their own towns.